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1 February 2015

Chocolate from McTunney's Sweet Emporium [by @NLi10]

I love going into new sweetshops, and I'd seen one in the Custard Factory in Birmingham's Digbeth region that I'd not properly been round. I'd not been into McTunney's before because most of the time I'm in that part of town everything is closed. I made a special effort to pop over - purely because I needed a hot cup of tea and they do them for £1 and found lots of stuff I hadn't tried. They also sell bottles of Fentiaman's for cheap so I need to find excuses to go over to play more games in my favourite games store nearby so that I can take advantage.

Their specialty is jar sweets, but they don't sell anything they don't like meaning that everything here is pretty darn good! There are imports and sealed bars too so that's where I focused my attention.

I chose some odd chocolates to try.

The kingdom chocolates got opened first. I expected explosive flavours, but these are far more subtle. In both the flavours are just in the creme in the middle and not all that strong. I can't really taste the rhubarb to my disappointment. Both are very nice, but I prefer my flavours more explosive. At least these are very eatable and you can keep munching cube after cube should you want to.

The apple crumble bar doesn't have crumble on the top of the chocolate which was a surprise, but it does have lovely sharp bites of apple in the chocolate which more than makes up for it. These are chewy and make the chocolate a lot more appetising than I'd expected. The Montezuma range is always quality, but some are better than others and this is near the top of the scale.

The little bars at the top have stevia instead of sugar as their sweetener. This means that the texture is wrong - the chocolate snaps off really sharply and is confusingly fragile. Thing is - the taste is pretty darn similar and any differences may just be down to the brand.

Both bars I'd expected to eat one cube then pass on to others to try, but surprisingly these are good. The cocoa nibs one has a lovely gritty texture under the chocolate and a flavour that lingers. The lemon/lime one has a much stronger bite than than the kingdom bars with similar ideas, and I think that they are more to my - one cube per sitting - taste.

The shop has a website so those of you not in the Midlands can go check out the range too.